Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 7 May 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Dr. Dan McLaughlin:

I don't ... nobody ever discussed risk concentration with me. I would just make one point about ... or two points, briefly. One, Bank of Ireland had 45% to 50% of its loans in residential mortgages, of which about half were in the UK, so ... and a lot of other lending was in the UK as well, so I think there was a view that that offered diversification. I think what happened for all of the banks, in 2008, 2009, was that having commercial property in different jurisdictions didn't prove a very good risk diversification strategy, because in a crisis, unfortunately the correlations collapsed to one. In other words, they all collapsed together, and that is a rare phenomenon but that's what happened.

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